Watch out Hudson Yards, Midtown is moving east to Queens. The glassy ghetto formerly known as Long Island City is sprouting a small city worth of skyscrapers, ushering in thousands of new residents, hundreds of hotel rooms, and a few hundred thousand square feet of office space. To help us visualize the neighborhood’s upcoming transformation, the dynamos at Rockrose Development commissioned visualization experts Zum-3d to produce this exceptionally accurate depiction of the changes afoot. Inspired by the rendering, 6sqft has put together a rundown of the nearly 30 under-construction and proposed projects for the ‘hood.

New developments encircling LIC’s long-tallest Court Square Tower

Cluster of towers planned around the Queens Plaza transit hub

The captured view looks west over Sunnyside Railyards, and chiefly shows the towers planned around the Court Square and Queens Plaza transit hubs. So far, the vast majority of the planned towers have been of residential use, though a few commercial office proposals are stirring. With the neighborhood’s quick access to Midtown and now Hudson Yards, it’s no mystery why LIC is turning into Manhattan’s bedroom community.

Our part was to gather helicopter footage of the existing area, and fill in the blanks with all of the upcoming developments for the next six years. The idea is to tie all of the planned projects to a fluid timeline that captures the process from start to finish. Working on two separate views of the neighborhood, we capture the process from every angle. Real photography is blended with 3D rendering to create a complete picture that lets us glimpse into the future. Using existing architectural designs of planned projects, we created fully fleshed-out realizations, complete with realistic textures and lighting effects. The high level of detail is important, to give a realistic sense of the buildings once they are completed. The final result is a completely new urban landscape that must be seen to be believed.

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Here’s a look at the 28 under-construction and proposed developments for Long Island City. The annotations correspond to the lineup below and generally move from left to right (south to north) in the image. Astoundingly, the depiction doesn’t even paint the full picture. Missing in the image are dozens of smaller, hidden developments that include the 12 or so mid-rise hotels rising in Dutch Kills, a sprinkling of upcoming residential buildings in the Hunters Point area, and a full necklace of towers that will line the neighborhood’s waterfront (a.k.a. Vancouver on the East River) from Newtown Creek to the Queensboro Bridge.

There you have it; unfortunately most LIC’s latest developments are bereft of any architectural qualities, despite the fact developers were given a rather unconstrained blank slate. Only a handful of developments, such as FXFowle’s Purves Street tower, show potential. But overall, the borough will, at least into the near future, remain devoid of any true landmark.

LIC’s development also shows just how good we’ve gotten at tower-building and how poor we are at city-building. The neighborhood still lacks most basic amenities, and its auto-centric streetscape remains abysmal (though plans are in the works to make it less so). Unlike Downtown Brooklyn, LIC isn’t benefitted with a set of charming historical bones to make its future cityscape less anonymous. Nonetheless, these projects will sprout 24,500 units of much-needed housing according to the Long Island City Partnership, and if the point is to pack in as many residents as possible, then LIC will be a roaring success.

According to CityRealty, the median annual price per square foot of rental apartments in Long Island City stands at $53, which is quite a bargain when compared to most Manhattan locales. LIC’s 72 currently available one-bedroom apartments are asking a median rent of $3,063 per month and are mostly within new developments constructed in the last decade.